About Priorities

Institutions of learning and culture and science (other than pretentious art galleries and less pretentious monuments to “low culture” like sports stadiums and shopping venues) generally are financed on shoestring budgets by constant begging and grant-chasing.

One “public” institution in California that never has to ask for money—in fact seems to have more than it can ever get rid of, is Caltrans.  Never in the history of the human species has it been easier to get from point A to point B, and never in the history of the human species has there been less point in getting to point B . . . since just about every point B in the country is rapidly becoming exactly like every point A—in fact, the whole world seems bent on this course. . . Bring the mountain to Mohammed.

Every middle class family must have its private castle filled with stuff on a warehouse scale, but at the same time has to spend so much time working to afford it that there isn’t time to enjoy it.  At the same time, community institutions go begging.

With a slight shift in the proportion of work and money put to public vs. private use, maybe at the “cost” of one less superfluous computer per household, every town could have its own zoo or great botanical garden, complete with giant tropical greenhouses.

[Today’s great public works are no longer monuments to learning or even to religion, but to consumption (malls, etc.) and especially to movement (huge freeway systems, etc.) with the result that it is getting easier and easier to get to places that are getting less and less worth going to.]

For every mile of freeway unnecessarily repaved, we could buy and “save” a thousand acres of rainforest.

It hasn’t always been so.  Throughout most of the history of civilization (i.e. city life), the majority of the disposable wealth of a community was put toward its public, permanent institutions.

Nobody goes to Chartres or Rome to see Joe Sixpack’s two-story Cape Cod on Elm Street.  In fact, Joe Sixpack of the 1st or 12th Century didn’t think, like we seem to be trapped into thinking, that the first priority for his money was to build a monument to himself in the form of the biggest house on the block—that was for the few wealthy and powerful feuding families in town.

Instead the average citizen’s great pride was in his town’s public buildings—the ones that were made from all his neighbors’ spare change and sweat (and maybe even love), the ones that were built to last not for his own little lifetime, but for centuries, millenia even.

Even as recently as the first half of the 20th Century, citizens took real pride in their schools, churches, libraries, and built them with real style, and to last, and with the care and involvement of the whole community.  Such public venues are now treated as an afterthought, something to be slapped together as cheaply as possible by some contractor from who cares where, built, of course, according to all the bureaucratic “codes,” but with about the same consideration to style and aesthetics you would lavish on a tool shed.  Meanwhile everybody’s full attention [insert re my own case: Soquel Elementary vs. Capitola then new Soquel Elementary] is lavished on his/her own little (correction: huge) private castle—renovating this, adding that, redecorating the other, practically to the point of pathological obsession—and only to be ripped out and totally “redone” later to suit the taste of whoever buys the place next year.